No Telephone Delay Despite Strike Here

You may have a phone all set-up and fine right now in your room. But you don't know how many people mistakenly thought that you almost never got it installed. There were lots.

First off, there was this huge telephone strike this summer that kept everyone in Cambridge out of touch with each other for the entire time, Swamped with orders and lacking in workers, the phone company couldn't give the summer people new phones.

And even when the strike ended, Bell Tel would never be able to wade through the backlog. So we thought.

After the bosses patched up with the unions, it was common knowledge that if you got connected by the middle of October you'd be the first one on your block. This opinion, however, overlooked the capacity of the bureaucracy to bore its petitioners to death.

Unanswered Cards

When the workers came back, the phone company couldn't get in touch with all the people who had asked for service because these people didn't have telephones. So they sent our postcards, almost none of which were answered.

The summer people have dropped back out of Cambridge. And students moving out of summer subltes no longer need phones in apartments, but have been reclassified into the mass of returnees that the phone company handles every September. It's that simple.

A walking tour of the yard found most freshmen plugged in. And a call that got through to the telephone business office after five busy signals won the promise of a black one with a nine foot extension cord in five days.